Gear fault identification based on Hilbert–Huang transform and SOM neural network

Abstract

Gear vibration signals always display non-stationary behavior. HHT (Hilbert–Huang transform) is a method for adaptive analysis of non-linear and non-stationary signals, but it can only distinguish conspicuous faults. SOM (self-organizing feature map) neural network is a network learning with no instructors which has self-adaptive and self-learning features and can compensate for the disadvantage of HHT. This paper proposed a new gear fault identification method based on HHT and SOM neural network. Firstly, the frequency families of gear vibration signals were separated effectively by EMD (empirical mode decomposition). Then Hilbert spectrum and Hilbert marginal spectrum were obtained by Hilbert transform of IMFs (intrinsic mode functions). The amplitude changes of gear vibration signals along with time and frequency had been displayed respectively. After HHT, the energy percentage of the first six IMFs were chosen as input vectors of SOM neural network for fault classification. The analysis results showed that the fault features of these signals can be accurately extracted and distinguished with the proposed approach.